Physics Prof by Day; Amateur Astronomer by Night

Howard Trottier’s (left, above) day job concerns the teeny-tiniest stuff in the universe.

His night gig takes in the whole cosmos.

“From the subatomic to the big,” Trottier, a physics professor at Simon Fraser University, said. “They’re intricately linked, as it turns out.”

He is a theoretical subatomic physicist by training — research interests include lattice quantum chromodynamics and heavy-flavour physics — but his passion is the night sky.

Intrigued as a boy by the experiments carried out by his older brother, Lorne, (right, above) who built a crystal radio before Trottier was even born, he was always fascinated by science.

Lorne, 11 years Trottier’s senior, still has a huge influence. Co-founder of a Montreal tech company, Lorne donated $2.7 million of the $4.4-million cost — in effect, fronting the capital cost — of the two-year-old Trottier Observatory and Science Courtyard at SFU.

“He was my inspiration, he’s the biggest science nerd I’ve ever met,” Trottier said. “There’s enough of an age gap that when I was younger we didn’t hang around together a whole lot, but I could see what he was doing. He was always in the basement soldering together stuff.”

When Trottier was growing up in Montreal, around 11 years old, and on an overnight camping trip in the Laurentians outside Quebec City, a camp counsellor introduced him to the night sky.

“He took 30 of the nerdiest kids to look at the stars and that’s what really pushed me into astronomy. I had never seen the night sky like that or had any understanding of it before that.

“I went home and had to buy a telescope. I used my paper route to save money and bought a telescope. When I saw the rings of Saturn I was screaming in the street, ‘Oh my gosh, look at the rings!’